I’ve been updating my blog a decent amount lately. To do so, I’ve been using the blogging software known as MarsEdit. WordPress comes with a web-based system for posting, but I find a desktop application to be far more effective for meeting my needs in an application.
MarsEdit meets my needs pretty well. It allows me to save drafts locally and work on them when I don’t have an internet connection. It also allows me to drag and drop pictures into my posts with no additional work. I can literally drag a picture from wikipedia and drop it into the edit box, having it come out as it did in my previous post for Cog Sci. It handles all of the uploading and resizing automagically.
MarsEdit certainly isn’t the only desktop blogging application. I’ve tried a few others before. Mainly Ecto, and a bit of Blogo. I feel MarsEdit has the cleanest, most useful interface I’ve encountered though.
It does come with the unfortunate price tag of $29, which seems a little steep for the amount of use I personally will get out of it. (Seeing as my blog only stays active about one month a year.) I’m not sure if I’ll find myself buying the full version when my trial expires, but if I don’t, I think I’ll have a hard time replacing it. Bottom line, if you need to make posts to a blog on a Mac, wish to avoid using the web interface, and are willing to pay some money, MarsEdit is definitely a worthwhile tool.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the nifty Flickr integration, which doesn’t affect me a whole lot, since I rarely post to flickr, but it can upload your images to your Flickr account before dropping them into your post.
